Hedgehogs at Hampton Court Palace Flower Show

Britain's favourite mammal the hedgehog has a royal invitation to next week's
Hampton Court Palace garden show

Rare sight: a blonde hedgehog among spring flowersPhoto: Alamy

By Kate Bradbury

7:00AM BST 04 Jul 2014

These days, you rarely visit a flower show without seeing a smattering of wildlife-friendly gardens. Lately at Chelsea you can't move for naturalistic, meadow-style planting, while habitats such as green roofs, long grass, log piles and bee hotels have all become increasingly visible in gardens over the years.

It's fantastic to see, and should inspire the millions of gardeners who traipse along Chelsea's Main Avenue and around the gardens at Hampton Court every season. A stylish home for wildlife at the world's greatest and biggest flower shows can inspire similar projects at home. The more habitats there are for wildlife, the more wildlife there will be. But I've always felt that show garden designers could do a little more. Too often I've seen fantastic pollinator-friendly planting alongside a water feature with steep, vertical sides and no means for birds to bathe or amphibians to breed; no plants to shelter the aquatic larvae of insects; and no way out for lost hedgehogs, which are prone to drowning in steep-sided ponds. Can a show garden with such an inhospitable feature be viewed as wildlife-friendly?

This year's Hampton Court Palace Flower Show will feature the world's first Hedgehog Street Garden. Designed by Tracy Foster for the British Hedgehog Preservation Society (BHPS) in conjunction with the People's Trust for Endangered Species (PTES), the garden will demonstrate just how easy it is to create a safe environment for hedgehogs.

DesignerTracy Foster, who has created the world's first hedgehog garden (CLARA MOLDEN)

Rather than have one or two hedgehog-friendly features, the garden will provide a habitat as a whole, with not a single steep-sided water feature in sight. The inspiration for this is, of course, a hedgehog decline.

Voted the nation's favourite mammal in a BBC Wildlife Magazine poll last year, the humble hedgehog is now a rare sight for many gardeners. As little as 60 years ago, Britain was home to 30 million hedgehogs. Now it's estimated that the population has shrunk to one million, according to a report published by the PTES in 2011. It's not known exactly why hedgehog numbers are declining so alarmingly, but one contributory factor is the way we manage our gardens. Hedgehogs like to roam, not just around one garden but through several. It's thought they travel on average one mile a night to forage for food, and in the breeding season they also wander in search of a mate. Yet we gardeners unwittingly stop them from doing this by erecting rigid, impenetrable boundaries between us and the neighbours. A journey broken by garden fences and walls forces hedgehogs on to the road and the risk of being squashed by a car. In addition, many front gardens have been paved, so offer little food. The Hedgehog Street campaign has recently celebrated its third birthday and now has more than 30,000 volunteers committed to helping hedgehogs by joining gardens together. A joint venture between the BHPS and the PTES, it wants communities to make whole streets of gardens better habitats for wildlife.

The campaign advocates the creation of ponds with gentle sloping sides, long grass and compost heaps, and fewer slug pellets. But the biggest message to gardeners is to create corridors: make holes in your boundaries so hedgehogs can travel safely between gardens, rather than risk their life on the road. It's that simple.

Tracy Foster was desperate to be involved in the Hedgehog Street garden for Hampton Court Palace Flower Show. "When my generation were kids, families of hedgehogs lived in our gardens," she says. But Foster rarely sees them now. "It's incredibly sad; they're part of our heritage and they're just so lovely. Everyone seems to love hedgehogs, it would be a shame to keep losing them."

Refuge: the Hedgehog Street garden

One of the summer gardens at Hampton Court, Foster's Hedgehog Street Garden presents a cross-section of three suburban plots, all with hedgehog-friendly features. "I tried to imagine who would live in each garden," she says.

"There's an older couple, a young couple, and a family with a more relaxed approach to gardening. Combined, the three plots make a fantastic habitat for hedgehogs, and of course there are plenty of holes in the boundaries for hedgehogs to travel between the different gardens."

Keen to prove that wildlife-friendly gardens need not look wild and unkempt, Foster included a traditional garden in her design. It is neat and tidy, but has pretty, cottage-type flowers in the borders. There are little box hedges for hedgehogs to shelter under; a fruit tree to provide deciduous leaves, which hedgehogs use as nesting material; and a range of plants to attract beetles and caterpillars, which hedgehogs eat. There is also a hedgehog feeding station, where gardeners can leave out meat-based dog or cat food, and a dish of water. "This is covered and designed to deter bigger animals such as cats and foxes, so hedgehogs can feed in safety," says Foster.

The central garden is more of a contemporary space, with a shallow water feature that hedgehogs could drink from without risk of falling in. This garden has ornamental grasses, where hedgehogs can shelter during the day, as well as other strappy leaved plants to provide additional nesting material.

An insect house features in the garden (CLARA MOLDEN)

The third garden has more of a traditional wildlife garden feel, with wild flowers, long grass, a log pile and a hedgehog hibernation box.

No individual garden is better or worse for hedgehogs – it's the connection of habitats that counts, as illustrated by the visible holes in the boundaries.

Hedgehogs are not the only creatures that benefit from Hedgehog Street. "It's very much a social thing," says Foster. "If neighbours are going to start cutting holes in fences, they have to talk to each other. It brings communities together."

If you visit Hampton Court Palace Flower Show next week, do look at the Hedgehog Street Garden. Then chat over the fence to your neighbours about what you can do for Britain's favourite mammal.

ALSO LOOK AT

Jordans Wildlife Garden

Designed by Selina Botham to reflect a long-term commitment from Jordans to the British countryside, the garden features edible wildflowers, trees and hedges as a natural larder that gardeners can share with birds, bees, small mammals and insects.

RHS Invisible Garden

Here visitors can see the often hidden creatures that live in our gardens, from butterflies, bees and birds to earthworms and beetles, and even fungi. Use a microscope to investigate various garden life forms, and discover how you can support nature in your own garden, with the RHS science team and other experts.

For more information on the National Garden Bioblitz and to take part next year, visit Garden Bioblitz

To become a hedgehog champion and continue the fight to save Britain’s hedgehogs, visit Hedgehog Street